How do I administer an Athena (Moira) list or group?

Moira Lists OnlyThe instructions here apply only to a traditional Moira mailing list or group. These instructions will not work for a Mailman list. To administer a Mailman list, please see our article titled "How do I administer a Mailman list?"

Overview

There are two primary ways to administer a Moira list: from the Athena command line (athena%) or via the web. While the web interface is simpler, there is some functionality that can only be access from the Athena command line.

4 Hour DelayAny changes that you make will take up to four hours to affect the mail servers. Changes made to groups through moira will take effect immediately.

listmaint

You can use the interactive program "listmaint" to maintain your Moira list. To run it, type "listmaint"

joeuser@athena:~$ listmaint

That will give you a menu listing various options. To update the membership of a list, select Option 6 "Member Menu - Change/Show Members of a List." That will ask you for the name of the list, and then give you a menu titled "Change/Display membership". From that menu you can add members, remove members, and display a list of the members.

There are four different types of members that can be added or deleted:

USER

The most common type of member, anyone who has an Athena account. Only the person's username should be entered, not their full address. For example, joeuser@mit.edu would be added as type USER and the "Name of USER to add" would be joeuser.

LIST

Used for adding other Moira lists to your list. If a list address is @mit.edu, it should be added as type LIST. Only the part of the address before the @ should used as the name of the list. For example, the list accounts@mit.edu would be added as type LIST and the "Name of LIST to add" would be accounts.

KERBEROS

Used for adding a kerberos principal only, and should not be used for most lists.

STRING

Used for addresses that don't end in @mit.edu. This includes other MIT departments (e.g. joeuser@csail.mit.edu, joeuser@sloan.mit.edu) and external addresses (e.g. joeuser@gmail.com, joeuser@fas.harvard.edu).

blanche

If you make a lot of changes to lists, you may prefer to use "blanche". In most cases, you can just add users to your list with the command:

joeuser@athena:~$ blanche listname -add username

Note: Be sure to fill in the correct information for listname and username.

Blanche will do its best to figure out what type of member is being added. Most of the time it does a good job, but it's wise to recheck when you are finished to make sure.

You can delete users by changing the '-add' to '-delete'. For a list of people on your list, simply type 'blanche listname'. If you want to add a long list of names to a list, you can put them all in a text file and do 'blanche listname -al filename', or if you want a list to contain only the names in a text file, you can type 'blanche listname -f filename' and the appropriate members will be both added and removed.

For more information on blanche, type 'man blanche'.

WebMoira

Another method of editing your mailing lists is to use the web interface to moira: